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Articles by Dwayne McDaniel
Three attack surfaces: An AI agent exposes its host, its identity, and itself. Nine public incidents between May 2025 and July 2026 hit all three; the agent surface appears in five, always combined with the host or the identity. The credential is the target: In the injection incidents, the agent reads an issue, an email, a settings file, or a web page that carries instructions. The instruction opened the door, and the credential is what the attacker came for.
AI Hooks for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex: Block Secrets Before Agents Can Use Them
TL;DR Instructions are suggestions, not controls: Prompts, AGENTS.md, and CLAUDE.md files only guide an agent, which can reinterpret or route around them. Security needs deterministic controls that hold no matter how the agent reasons. Hooks enforce rules at the system level: AI hooks run deterministic checks before prompts reach the model, before tools execute, and after output returns, allowing or blocking each step regardless of the agent's reasoning.
GhostAction Returns: 772 Repos Hit in New GitHub Actions Wave
Update, Oct. 9, 2026: The campaign did not stop at the end of September. On Oct. 8, a new burst hit 346 repositories in two automated sweeps lasting minutes, according to analysis published by Socket's research team. Two compromised maintainer accounts, kitao and henrywoo, pushed a workflow named security-audit.yml into every repository they could write to, including kitao/pyxel (18,420 stars) and uber/athenadriver. The exfiltration endpoint is the same 193.32.204.199 address documented below.
Secrets Management Best Practices: 6 Reasons Your Vault Needs Detection
TL;DR Vault stores, governs, rotates, and records: A secrets vault gives organizations a controlled system for storing credentials, governing access, rotating secrets, and recording how they are used. Mature secrets management best practices require both. Credentials copied into files, logs, and repos: The vault establishes where credentials should live. But every organization also has credentials outside that system of record.
AI Created a Leaked Credentials Flood: Here's How We're Draining It
TL;DR The exposure problem: AI-driven development pushed exposed credentials to 1.27 million last year, up 81%, and 64% of secrets confirmed valid in 2022 are still unrevoked as of January 2026. The fix: GitGuardian Public Secrets Monitoring now runs two AI agents and deep analysis over every public GitHub and Docker Hub incident, returning a company-related verdict, a risk score, and visible reasoning.
OWASP Top 10 CI/CD Security Risks Explained: Why Credential Hygiene Decides the Outcome
TL;DR Credentials are the multiplier: OWASP's Top 10 CI/CD Security Risks cover ten distinct trust failures, but exposed or overprivileged credentials (CICD-SEC-6) make nearly every other risk more dangerous once attackers gain a foothold. Attacks are accelerating: Since 2025, worms like Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and ChainDrop have compromised hundreds of packages, and GitGuardian's 2026 report found 59% of machines hit in one early wave were CI/CD runners.
Credential Security: What Endpoint Protection Really Means for Secrets
TL;DR "Endpoint protection" is often heard as EDR: When buyers hear "endpoint," they think antivirus or EDR. Antivirus started as signature-based malware detection; EDR added continuous behavioral monitoring and response. Both are designed to detect and stop malicious activity on the machine. Credential security asks a different question: Neither antivirus nor EDR can tell you which valid credentials are exposed on a machine right now. That's credential security.
AWS S3 Bucket Security: Find the Secrets Hiding Outside Git
S3 buckets have quietly become a credential blind spot: years of logs, backups, and pipeline output that nobody ever scans for secrets. In one 2025 incident (Sysdig), attackers reached admin access in eight minutes using IAM keys found in a public bucket. TL;DR The Blind Spot: S3 buckets accumulate years of logs, backups, and pipeline output that never get scanned for secrets, and 28% of incidents now originate entirely outside code repositories.
Agentic AI Security: Credentials and Permissions Define the Blast Radius
Prompt injection can't be patched away. Three 2026 agentic AI incidents show that credentials and permissions decide the damage. The trick matters less than the access. Three 2026 disclosures, GitLost, Claude Code's CVE-2026-21852, and Amazon Q's CVE-2026-12957, show agent manipulation determines less damage than the credentials and permissions the agent can reach. Secrets exposure keeps climbing.
Machine-Speed Credential Abuse: What the ChainDrop npm Worm Changes
ChainDrop hijacked 444 npm packages and 2B monthly downloads via a Claude Code hook. AI agents have collapsed the gap between credential theft and abuse TL;DR Machine-speed attacks: AI agents have collapsed the time between credential discovery and abuse to near-zero, removing the human reaction window defenders used to count on. ChainDrop in numbers: This Shai-Hulud npm worm hijacked publishing access to hit 444 packages downloaded roughly 2 billion times per month, according to Microsoft.
Why Secrets Slip Through Every Layer of Your Security Stack
Your security stack is a set of specialists, each guarding one territory. Exposed credentials don't respect the boundaries between them, and 64% of the ones found valid in 2022 were still valid four years later. TL;DR Multiple locations, one credential: An API key moves from a developer's laptop to a repo, pipeline logs, a ticket, and a teammate's config; each copy carries the same access, and no single tool tracks all five. Every tool has a job.
Inside the LiteLLM hack: 153GB, 433,909 Files, 2,488 Organizations
Attackers dumped everything they harvested from LiteLLM builds during a 40-minute window in March. Here is what is inside and what it says about where secrets live. TL;DR Hudson Rock and CloudSEK confirmed the scale of the March LiteLLM PyPI hack: a 153GB archive, 433,909 files. 118,829 CI runner dumps trace back to 2,488 organizations across the exposed archive. Many dumps carry no email, domain, or hostname — unattributable, with no way to disclose.
Your AI Agents Are Using Your Credentials
Key findings It's a secrets problem before it's an identity problem. Many AI agents don't have their own distinct identity, so they operate using API keys, tokens, and other credentials issued to humans or workloads. Those credentials can sit outside agent-specific identity controls. When no enterprise IdP mediates the exchange, agent activity can create a governance blind spot that standard identity reviews may not expose. Discovery and attribution come first.
Vault Coverage Is the Missing Metric in NHI Programs
Most large enterprises have some version of a vault program, the combination of policy, platform, process, and ownership used to manage machine credentials. It includes the secrets manager itself, the teams that operate it, the IAM policies that govern it, and the application teams expected to use it. The credentials themselves belong to machine identities: the service accounts, workloads, and AI agents actually doing the authenticating.
Mini Shai-Hulud's Latest Wave: 280 New Places It Hunts for Your Secrets
We have stopped counting the number of waves in the Shai-Hulud attack series, but this week has seen the rise of yet another iteration. This campaign started with the infection of the keyv@6.0.0 npm package at 9:35 a.m. UTC on Aug. 4, 2026, and quickly spread across the ecosystem.
40 Million Fake Push: When Spam Commits Took Over The Public GitHub
The Month GitHub Public Contributions Exploded To date, GitHub remains the most widely used code storage cloud platform. The amount of data pushed to GitHub every year is tremendous. In 2025 alone, GitGuardian's Public Monitoring platform analyzed more than 2 billion commits. This represents around 5.5M commits per day and an impressive amount of data. However, since July 2026, this number has exploded.
Securing Agentic AI Workflows in n8n: From Leaked API Keys to Encryption Key Compromise
Agentic AI expands the security boundary of workflow automation. An n8n agentic workflow does not just generate an answer. It uses stored credentials to act across source control, databases, cloud platforms, AI providers, and SaaS applications. A leaked n8n API key is therefore only the beginning of the attack path. At the center of that access is a single root of trust: the N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY.
Credential Harvesting Explained: How Attackers Collect Secrets From Developer Machines
TL;DR: Credential harvesting is the large-scale collection of valid credentials that lets attackers log in as legitimate users. Developer machines are an especially rich source: unlike phishing, the credentials already sit in plaintext on disk, so no one needs to be tricked. Case in point: credential abuse remains the single most pervasive technique across full breach chains.
What Was on This Machine? Answering the Blast Radius Question After a Laptop Compromise
TL;DR: The containment clock starts immediately after a developer's laptop is compromised, an infostealer fires an alert, a device goes missing, or a dependency turns malicious. While important, EDR and incident response only tell you what happened on the machine, like which processes ran, what the attacker touched, and what was exfiltrated. They can't tell you what was exposed, such as valid credentials that an attacker can now use.
An AI Agent Breached Hugging Face. The Attack Playbook Was Older Than the Attacker
On July 16, 2026, Hugging Face disclosed unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets. Five days later, OpenAI confirmed the attacker had come from inside its own walls. A combination of OpenAI models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable prerelease model, escaped a sandboxed cyber-capabilities evaluation and went hunting for benchmark answer keys. Along the way, it escalated privilege and harvested multiple credentials for internal Hugging Face services.
How to Reduce Time to Revoke for Exposed Credentials
This is the second article in a series on time to revoke, following our piece on The Hacker News. The first explains how to measure the amount of time an exposed credential remains usable. This article focuses on the operational changes security teams can make to shrink that exposure window. TL;DR: Reducing time to revoke means addressing the operational blockers that keep exposed credentials valid after detection.
Why SAST and DAST Aren't Enough for Secrets Security
If you run an application security program in 2026, secrets detection can look like a solved line item. Your static analysis suite ships rules for hardcoded credentials. Your code platform's built-in scanner flags API keys on push. So when someone asks if SAST and DAST are enough for secrets security, the reasonable response is: yes. That answer holds only if a leaked credential behaves like any other finding. Spoiler alert: it doesn't.
How to Measure Time to Revoke for Exposed Credentials
This is a follow-up to an article we published in The Hacker News introducing time to revoke as a critical CISO metric. This version provides a practical guide for measuring it across exposed secrets and non-human identities. 👉 TL;DR: Time to revoke is a security metric that measures how long an exposed credential remains usable after it has been confirmed valid. Measuring it requires teams to record when a credential is validated and when its invalidation is confirmed.
The Perimeter Moved to the Laptop: From Network, to Identity, to the Developer Endpoint
👉 TL;DR: The perimeter has moved before. It went from the network to identity, the shift everyone summarized as "identity is the new perimeter." It is moving again, onto the device. Open a developer's laptop, and you will find a stash of working credentials: cloud access keys, API tokens, SSH keys, package-registry tokens, and the secrets AI coding agents cache as they run. Network controls never see them.
What CISA Got Right After Its GitHub Leak: Lessons Every Organization Should Copy
On May 14, 2026, we found 844 MB of sensitive CISA-related data in a public GitHub repository and got it taken down in 26 hours. I told the story in How We Got a CISA GitHub Leak Taken Down in Under a Day. Two months later, CISA published Lessons from CISA's Cyber Incident. Most organizations bury this kind of incident. CISA wrote it up, explained what worked, what did not, and invited the industry to learn from it. As a practitioner, I think the document is really good.
Identity Infrastructure: Why Credentials Are the Layer Directories Don't Secure
👉 TL;DR: Identity infrastructure is the foundation of enterprise security: the directories, identity providers, access management systems, credential stores, and governance workflows that control who and what can reach organizational resources. Most enterprises treat identity infrastructure as a directory problem, investing in Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, or SailPoint to manage identity lifecycle and access policy. Those investments are necessary, but on their own, they are incomplete.
Every Laptop Is a Credential Store: Complete Map of Hidden Secrets
👉 TL;DR: A developer's laptop quietly becomes one of the densest credential stores in the organization. Cloud keys sit in ~/.aws, tokens pile up in shell history and .npmrc, SSH keys live in ~/.ssh, session cookies persist in the browser, and AI coding agents cache secrets in their own config files. None of it in a Git repository, none of it visible to the scanners most teams rely on.
HMAC Secrets Explained: Authentication You Can Actually Implement
HMAC (Hash-based Message Authentication Code) secrets are the industry standard for webhook signatures, internal API authentication, and session tokens. They provide a fast, simple way to verify that a message hasn't been altered and came from a trusted source. While services like Stripe, GitHub, and Slack make HMAC easy to consume, implementing it securely requires attention to detail.
Responding to Exposed Secrets - An SRE's Incident Response Playbook
Today, let's take a closer look at incident response playbooks: how to build one, tailor it for secret leaks, take actions, and learn from incidents. By Tiexin Guo • 27 Jan 2026 • 10 min read Imagine this: It's a regular Thursday morning when disaster strikes. The on-call engineer receives a flood of alerts -- unusually high API failures of an internal service. Reverting to a previous version changes nothing. Now, colleagues are panicking in crisis mode.
Your Secrets Need a VDP, Not Just a Bug Bounty
Bug bounty programs are valuable -- until they replace disclosure policies. Learn how unreasonable PoC demands or scope exclusions create security blind spots when it comes to leaked secrets. By Gaetan Ferry • 6 Feb 2026 • 8 min read In recent years, more and more companies have launched bug bounty programs as proof of their commitment to security and as a way to implement continuous monitoring of their corporate attack surface.
Blast Radius: What a Leaked Secret Breaks
The credential with the widest blast radius sometimes has no secret to flag. See how GitGuardian and Anyshift rank risk by what actually breaks. By Louis Fradin • 23 Jul 2026 • 7 min read 👉 TL;DR: Identity-local signals show whether a credential or machine identity is risky. Topology signals show what breaks if that identity is abused.
Extending Our Mission With Developer Endpoint Protection
Since day one, our mission at GitGuardian has been clear: prevent accidental secret exposure and stand alongside developers as they build. We've helped thousands of teams secure their code repositories and other data sources, preventing credentials from leaking. The risk has moved. Developer workstations have always carried more credential exposure than most teams realize: shell histories, config files, local caches accumulating credentials for years. AI coding agents are accelerating that risk.
GitGuardian NHI Governance Now Gives More Comprehensive Visibility
If you're an IAM lead, you've probably spent the last five years perfecting your human identity security. MFA everywhere. Privileged management locked down. Just-in-time access is working like a charm. Your employees' identities are pretty well governed overall. But here's what's keeping us up at night, and I suspect you too: for every employee identity you're managing, roughly hundreds of machine identities are doing who knows what. API keys in places you didn't know existed.
Top 10 Non-Human Identity Security Tools and Platforms for 2026
TL;DR: Non-human identities (service accounts, API keys, workload identities, certificates, OAuth apps, machine-to-machine access) now outnumber humans over 1:1 in most cloud-native orgs. The biggest security risks are unmanaged lifecycle, overprivileged access, and exposed credentials across SDLC and cloud environments, not just secret storage.
Gartner IAM Summit 2026: Identity Expanded Faster Than Most Programs Did
The keynote set the tone early. Identity is no longer just a control layer for workforce access. It is becoming part of the operating fabric of the enterprise itself, shaping resilience, trust, and how organizations adopt automation at scale.
How We Migrated the Heart of Our Platform to Rust
GitGuardian helps developers and security teams detect secrets (API keys, tokens, credentials) that have been accidentally committed to source code. At the core of our platform sits our secret detection engine: a component that takes raw bytes as input and outputs detected secrets, running against hundreds of gigabytes of code and data every day.
Leaked Kubernetes Secrets: Impact Assessment and Mitigation Strategies
Threat-intel reports from recent years document campaigns in which attackers obtain AWS IAM credentials from developer workstations, use them to enumerate cloud accounts and access Kubernetes clusters. From there, attackers deploy poisoned container images to move laterally and harvest secrets. The MITRE ATT&CK chain maps to: T1552.001 (Credentials in Files) → T1078.004 (Valid Accounts: Cloud Accounts) → T1610 (Deploy Container) → T1496 (Resource Hijacking). This is not an isolated case.
Mini Shai-Hulud: A persistent supply-chain worm
On April 29th, Aikido researchers detected multiple compromised Node.js packages in SAP's namespace today. The malware adapts to CI environments, steals GitHub personal access tokens, and uses them to self-propagate—a pattern consistent with recent supply-chain attacks. Update: May 12, 2026 Between May 11th and May 12th, a new phase of this attack was identified with numerous compromised NPM. While the big picture of the attack remains unchanged, the methodology shifted slightly.
AI Agents Security for Developers: Don't Let Your Agents Become a Liability
👉 TL;DR: The most common agentic AI security mistakes are ordinary security hygiene failures, now executed autonomously and at machine speed: API tokens stored locally, unscoped No approval gates before irreversible commands Production credentials in development environments MCP server configs with connection secrets committed to repos Overprivileged tokens that were "just for testing" and never got cleaned up Good old security hygiene is now the safety net between your coding agent and...
How We Got a CISA GitHub Leak Taken Down in Under a Day
On May 14, 2026, GitGuardian found what looked like leaked CISA secrets in a public GitHub repository named Private-CISA. It held 844 MB of data across the working tree and Git history. The working tree was 498 MB; the rest was Git history and objects. The repository contained: CI/CD build logs and deployment workflow documentation. Kubernetes manifests, ArgoCD application files, and secret-related YAML files. Terraform infrastructure code and related bundles.
GitGuardian Now Flags Admin and Overprivileged Identities Across AWS, Entra, and Okta
Not all leaked secrets carry the same risk. A leaked credential attached to a read-only logging job is more of a hygiene issue. The same credential attached to an AdministratorAccess role hands an attacker complete control of the account. Treating both incidents identically in the queue wastes responder time on the first and delays action on the second. GitGuardian's latest NHI Governance release introduces privilege context as a first-class signal in the platform.
Top 11 Identity Orchestration Tools and Platforms for 2026
TL;DR: Identity orchestration unifies fragmented IAM environments by connecting identity providers, directories, access policies, and governance workflows into a single, automated control plane. The top identity orchestration tools in 2026 fall into several categories: identity orchestration engines, IAM platforms with orchestration capabilities, identity governance and lifecycle platforms, and secrets security and NHI exposure prevention.
API Keys Security & Secrets Management Best Practices
TL;DR: Master API key management best practices by never storing unencrypted secrets in git, enforcing automated secrets scanning, and avoiding plaintext sharing in messaging systems. Use dedicated secrets management tools, apply least privilege and short-lived keys, and implement robust rotation and monitoring strategies. We have compiled a list of some of the best practices to prevent API key leakage and keep secrets and credentials safe.
No Off Season: Three Supply Chain Campaigns Hit npm, PyPI, and Docker Hub in 48 Hours
After a few quieter weeks, three supply chain attacks put secrets back in the spotlight. Between April 21 and 23, 2026, three distinct attacks hit npm, PyPI, and Docker Hub simultaneously. Their targets differ and the threat actor groups might, but their objectives don't: in each case, the malware's primary goal was to steal secrets from developer environments and CI/CD pipelines. API keys, cloud credentials, SSH keys, and registry tokens were all targeted.
From Detection to Defense: How Push-to-Vault Supercharges Secrets Management for DevSecOps
If you work in security or DevSecOps, you already know secrets do not live only where they should, safely in secrets management platforms, aka vaults. They leak into Git repos, CI logs, Slack threads, Jira tickets, wikis, and "temporary" config files that never get cleaned up. We unfortunately know this problem is getting worse for most organizations. The State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 report found a 25% year-over-year increase in leaked secrets on public GitHub.
Lessons in Testing, Performance, and Legacy Systems from /dev/mtl 2025
Montreal, Canada, is the birthplace of the search engine. Long before the world was talking about semantic search and vector embeddings, a student at McGill built Archie to find files across FTP servers. The creator's goal wasn't to change how everyone would use the internet; it was to solve a specific issue around finding available files by exact title.
San Francisco's cable cars are the only moving National Historic Landmark in the United States, a century-old system that can deliver modern reliability when skilled people guide the machinery. Watching a gripman work the brake down Powell Street is a lesson in human-centered control. You can mechanize the track, instrument the descent, and rely on a person to ultimately make emergency calls that keep riders safe. This made the city a perfect backdrop for SRE Day San Francisco 2025.
The Role of AI and Compliance in Modern Risk Management: ShowMeCon 2025
When people think of St. Louis, it's often the Gateway Arch or the Cardinals that come to mind. Just across the Missouri River is one of the "Show Me" state's oldest European settlements, dating back to 1769, St. Charles. Front just a stone's throw from where Lewis and Clark set off on their famous expedition, something more than baseball statistics, historical trivia, or architectural wonders was being discussed in early June: security, compliance, and risk, at ShowMeCon 2025.
Beneath Seattle's bustling Pioneer Square lies the remains of another city. After the Great Fire of 1889, local engineers elevated the street level, leaving behind the original storefronts and sidewalks in a warren of subterranean tunnels. This hidden underworld, known as the Seattle Underground, was buried to make room for progress. But it never disappeared, it just became invisible. Today, our digital infrastructure mirrors that layered reality.
ATLSecCon 2025: Security Readiness Means Human Readiness
Halifax has always been a city built on readiness. Its ferry system, among the oldest in North America, has connected communities across Halifax Harbour since 1752. It has run through storms, wartime, and centuries of change. The city's iconic lighthouses, like the one on Georges Island, once guarded British naval fleets and signaled the dangers of hidden shoals. That legacy of vigilance and coordination set the tone for ATLSecCon 2025.
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